Facing, for the first time in his term, some hope of sustaining a veto of Republican lawmakers’ budget, Gov. Roy Cooper wasted little time Friday.

Cooper — flanked by teachers, health care officials, influential progressives and, perhaps, a few key swing votes in the Democratic caucus — slammed legislators’ $24 billion spending plan as a “failure of common sense and common decency” at the Executive Mansion in Raleigh.

A few blocks away, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger — perhaps the most powerful Republican in the state — held a press conference in the legislative building, chiding the governor for his decision. Berger argued that Cooper is holding up the state’s spending plan over Medicaid expansion.

“If (Cooper) says he’s willing to compromise, I’m more than happy to have our members engage with him,” Berger said. “I will tell you I’m not optimistic about his willingness to compromise based on his track record.”

And Republican lawmakers, who’ve rarely faced even a fleeting necessity for compromise in the last decade, scoff.

It’s only a matter of resolving whether the remaining negotiations last days, weeks or, gulp, months.

“Overall, this budget is bad, it prioritizes the wrong things,” Cooper told reporters Friday. The budget values tax breaks over public schools, he insisted, and “political ideology over people,” likely a reference to Medicaid.

Cooper was joined at the mansion Friday by Mandy Cohen, secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services. Cohen has urged lawmakers to adopt Medicaid expansion since Cooper appointed her to the role in January 2017.

The governor’s budget also breaks sharply with Republicans on K-12 spending, teacher raises, and school construction. Facing an $8 billion tab for school infrastructure, Cooper, like House Speaker Moore, has supported a statewide bond committing billions. Berger and Senate legislators emphasized a “pay-as-you-go” approach, pledging to spend more than $4 billion on school buildings in the next decade.

Ask a teacher whether they’re willing to trust lawmakers’ promise of future action, particularly given the infrastructure bill owes to years, not months, of neglect from state leaders.

Overriding the governor’s veto will require a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. And while a handful of Democrats voted with Republicans on the budget bill this week, it’s unclear whether any would go so far as to join Republicans in the override.

Case in point: Sen. Floyd McKissick, a Durham Democrat awaiting confirmation for an appointment to the state Utilities Commission, stood directly behind Cooper Friday. McKissick voted with the GOP to approve the budget Thursday, but it seems most unlikely he’d support the override.

Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger

Berger repeated his assertion Friday that lawmakers were open to a conversation about Medicaid expansion, provided it’s held in a special session, something of a ludicrous delaying tactic given the issue’s front-burner position for most of the decade.

Republicans leaders are expected to woo Democrats to their side with “pork” spending on local projects in the budget, a point Berger seemed to hint at Friday.

“I believe every member should vote on this bill based on what they believe is best for their districts and their constituents,” he said. “And not what is best for their political party.”

Berger claimed that he has not asked for nor received any pledges from Democrats to vote with the GOP.

Still, the Senate leader acknowledged there may be lawmakers in his party willing to consider expansion, but not enough to pass it. Berger added that he would not support the expansion, repeating the claim that the increased Medicaid spending could “blow a hole in the budget” if the federal government reneges on its promise to pay the lion’s share of the tab.

To hear North Carolina’s legislative leaders put it Tuesday, Gov. Roy Cooper is nowhere to be found.

While these earnest lawmakers toiled on their $24 billion budget compromise in recent days, Cooper was in New York, they complained, as if we could presume that the Democrat couldn’t be pulled from his junket, sunbathing atop the Chrysler Building, pillowed by a pile of “big city liberal” cash.

As if Cooper and company have not been engaged with legislative leaders for days, weeks and months before Cooper’s New York soiree, a political story with all the depth of a Tweet and the nutritional content of a Twinkie.

“We held this off as long as we could, hoping we could get some input from the governor, but here we are today,” groaned Sen. Harry Brown, the Jacksonville Republican who chairs the Senate’s budget panel.

The putrescent hog farms of Duplin County smell better than this.

Whatever you may think of Cooper, it’s a safe assumption that North Carolina’s journalists, and its people, have a memory surpassing that of a fruit fly.

Even last week’s sausage biscuit bargaining at the Capitol yielded nothing, while staffers for Cooper and legislative Republicans fired potshots on Twitter.

Democrats said Republicans weren’t willing to come to the table; Republicans countered that the governor had made Medicaid expansion — a cacophony in the far-right Republican caucus and nowhere else on this tortured Earth — a central point of negotiations.

“I’d rather have a budget that reflects a portion of our priorities than no budget at all,” Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger told reporters Tuesday.

Education funding was the greatest amount ever spent in North Carolina history, Speaker Tim Moore boasted. Good, now we’ll have to see if that raw number means a blessed thing when adjusted for inflation, per-pupil spending, and the needs of a school system that’s been underfunded for the lion’s share of Republican reign.

The knowledge that Moore and House lawmakers cracked on school infrastructure makes for a bad start. At least Moore and company were willing to consider a bond referendum for the state’s $8 billion-plus in school infrastructure needs, but the compromise budget’s “pay-as-you-go” Senate spending plan reeks.

We spoke about “bad faith” earlier, and those who can recall the high-stakes, brouhaha over class-size funding in recent years can appreciate why K-12 advocates are not likely to trust that lawmakers will deliver on school construction needs over the next decade without a bond.

The minority party, which has the votes to sustain a veto, was not impressed.

“Democrats have been clear about our budget priorities: Medicaid expansion, a statewide school construction bond, and no more corporate tax cuts,” Senate Democratic Leader Dan Blue said Tuesday. “The conference report fails to acknowledge any of these; and it makes clear that Republicans don’t understand the value of finding common ground.”

As of this writing, Cooper had no official statement, but his spokespeople didn’t hold back.

This isn’t a mad lib. It’s a negotiation. And a negotiation requires that *everything* be on the table. #ncga Republicans not willing to do that. #ncpolhttps://t.co/G2K0afTSLh

As of this moment, we — the huddled people, press and politicos of North Carolina — haven’t seen a draft of lawmakers’ agreed upon budget, but given the latest dispatch from Gov. Roy Cooper’s office, this one has veto written all over it.

Which is to say that our turgid budget process, which was supposed to wrap before the July 1 beginning of the fiscal year, may last weeks and even months.

Stated Cooper spokesperson, Ford Porter, Monday morning:

“We want a budget that invests in teacher pay instead of more tax cuts for corporations, that has a school and infrastructure bond instead of a slush fund, and that includes Medicaid expansion to insure 500,000 more North Carolinians. Right now, legislative Republicans are not interested in serious negotiations on these issues, but we hope they will change their minds and agree to put everything on the table as Governor Cooper has.”

As The Insider‘s Colin Campbell reported, even a sausage biscuit confab Friday at the Capitol with Cooper, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, and House Speaker Tim Moore, was a blunt failure.

From The Insider:

On Friday morning, House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger walked to the old Capitol building to meet with Cooper and House Democratic Leader Darren Jackson, D-Wake. Berger was spotted carrying a bag of Bojangles’ sausage biscuits, while both legislative leaders were carrying binders labeled “budget compromise options.” One of those proposals involves agreeing to a special legislative session “to address health access issues, including Medicaid expansion,” according to a joint statement from Berger and Moore.

“The governor previously proposed a ‘two-track’ solution and wants Medicaid to be ‘part of the conversation,'” the joint statement said. “This meets both of those requests. The governor rejected the proposal. We’ve asked for concrete compromise proposals from the governor for nearly two weeks now. He has refused to provide them.” Cooper spokesman Ford Porter said Friday that during the meeting Cooper and Jackson “made clear to Republican leaders that they oppose corporate tax cuts, unaccountable school vouchers and the SCIF slush fund and said that any budget compromise has to include discussion of Medicaid expansion, a school and infrastructure bond and significantly higher teacher salaries. Gov. Cooper indicated today that these items are negotiable, but Republican leaders have nearly completed their budget and are unwilling to discuss all of these important priorities that benefit our state.”

With legislators’ veto-proof majority torpedoed last year, this is the first time Cooper and legislators have been forced to haggle over the budget. Which is to say that we’ve never seen this negotiation before. Which is to say that the only thing we know is what we don’t know.

Every indication is legislators are intractable on Cooper’s biggest prize, Medicaid expansion, a damnably durable position for GOP legislators that’s as cold-hearted as it is illogical. But it’s clear that another round of GOP-authored tax cuts, school choice spending and a K-12 bond are on the table too.

The latter may be a key wedge in these deliberations. Moore’s already specified his tardy support for a statewide bond, while Berger retains his trademark acerbity on the subject. To recap, North Carolina faces billions in school facility demands. Moore has been willing to create a bond for at least a portion of those needs, but Berger’s more conservative Senate is loathe to take on the debt.

The tit-for-tat deliberation is just beginning. Miles to go, it seems.

(Note: The following is a joint statement issued Monday by Bill Rowe, general counsel and deputy director of advocacy for the progressive N.C. Justice Center, Policy Watch’s parent nonprofit; and Jon Guze, director of legal studies for the conservative John Locke Foundation. The legislation it references, House Bill 770, is slated to be considered Tuesday morning by the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

The North Carolina Senate is currently considering a carefully crafted piece of legislation that creates new employment opportunities for millions of North Carolinians by making it easier for them to train for and be admitted to licensed occupations. The bill is a revised version of HB 770 (“Freedom to Work/OLB Reform”), and it combines the best features of two previously filed companion bills: SB 305—which was filed in March by Senator Andy Wells and Senator Warren Daniel—and the original version of HB 770—which was filed in April by Speaker Pro Tempore Sarah Stevens and approved last month by the North Carolina House of Representatives.

In North Carolina, more than 70 private boards and public agencies set licensing standards for approximately 180 different licensed occupations, and these occupations account for about 1/3 of all the jobs in the state. The standards currently in place tend to exclude people with criminal records and those who cannot afford extensive education and training. Since the ostensible justification for requiring occupational licenses is to protect the public from practitioners who cannot be trusted to do their work honestly, competently, and safely, these kinds of requirements make a certain amount of sense. However, as currently implemented, they go too far and exclude too many.

Creating Employment Opportunities for People with Criminal Records

An estimated 2 million North Carolinians—more than 25% of the working-age population—already have criminal records, and thousands more are convicted of crimes every year. Excluding all those people from a third of all jobs seems excessive on its face, but there’s another reason why such blanket exclusions are a bad idea. Nationally, more than 60% of people with criminal records remain unemployed a year after rejoining society, partially due to licensing restrictions. Research shows that work plays a significant role in preventing dependency and is an indicator of how likely someone is to re-offend. If we want to discourage recidivism, therefore, we need to remove unnecessary restrictions on employment.

HB 770 does precisely that by requiring all licensing authorities, including state licensing agencies and private licensing boards, to review their existing policies with regard to applicants’ criminal histories and update those policies in specific ways. Rather than relying on blanket bans, agencies and boards will only be able to deny licenses on the basis of an applicant’s criminal record when the underlying crime is related to the duties and responsibilities of the licensed occupation or is of a violent or sexual nature. HB 770 also prohibits licensing boards from using non-specific and subjective considerations like “moral turpitude” and “good character” to determine whether someone will receive a work license.

HB 770 adds greater transparency to the process by requiring boards and agencies to state the considerations that will be used to grant or deny a license on their websites and on their application forms, and by requiring them to report to the General Assembly on how many applications are granted and denied, and the result when the applicant has a criminal record. It also gives licensees the ability to petition a licensing board for a determination of whether the individual’s criminal history will disqualify the individual from obtaining a license before they begin mandatory educational and training requirements, potentially saving applicants hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours.

These kinds of reforms are far from radical or experimental. Over the past few years more than 20 states have enacted occupational licensing reforms to open up opportunities for qualified people with records. Examples include Kansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi.

Creating Employment Opportunities for People with Limited Financial Resources

Onerous licensing requirements don’t just exclude people with criminal records; they also exclude those who cannot afford to spend hundreds of days and thousands of dollars on education and training. HB 770 provides an alternative pathway for such people by allowing the completion of government approved, private-sector created apprenticeships to fulfill costly licensing requirements—ensuring that workers receive the training they need, but in a cost-effective way. And because these apprenticeships are based on competency instead of time spent training, this reform opens work opportunities for young and low-income North Carolinians who would not otherwise be able to afford the high cost of training courses or the time off of work.

HB 770 is an important and timely reform that will benefit all North Carolinians. We hope it is promptly approved by the General Assembly and signed by the Governor.

Hard to imagine we’d be here in this day, in this time, in this place.

The Charlotte Observer contributed a timely, if slight, feature this weekend, an exploration of rural Hendersonville’s nascent “Pride” celebration, yet another marker of North Carolina’s quiet LGBTQ revolution.

The word “revolution” is appropriate, with support for same-sex marriage surging to an unlikely 62 percent in North Carolina, a state that had overwhelmingly, heedlessly, passed a constitutional amendment to ban the practice in 2012.

The apple-picking, right-wing city joins a modest list of North Carolina locales crawling — or is it sprinting? — forward on LGBTQ pride, a few scatterbrained years after state lawmakers buffeted decency and fairness alike in crafting HB2 — a noxious anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-humanity law that’s deposed but, after all, not really dead.

As The Observer reported, Hendersonville Mayor Barbara Volk got behind the “Pride” event quickly, even if some of the city’s queasier and non-secular denizens stumbled over the plan.

From the feature:

Travis Parker, the pastor at Zirconia Missionary Baptist Church, said he went to rally outside the meeting because he was offended that the proclamation had effectively put the entire city’s support behind homosexuality — a sin according to the Bible, he said.

“Nobody said they couldn’t have a picnic,” Parker said, but “for the mayor to speak on behalf of all of Hendersonville was offensive to many people.”

The council itself was no less divided. The pride proclamation, said Mayor Pro Tem Ron Stephens, has stirred up more uproar than any other issue in the 12 years he’s been in office.

Like Stephens, the rest of city council — including three Republicans and one unaffiliated member — said they felt Volk had gone over their heads to support an issue they did not feel should get an official backing from local government.

All four of them expressed their opposition to Volk on the proclamation, which only requires the backing of the mayor. And now, they say, they’re working to amend city law so future proclamations must be voted on by the whole council.

“It just doesn’t need to be publicized and supported by the city,” Stephens said. “What people do in private needs to stay in private.”

Parker said he led a prayer meeting of several hundred people at the site of the picnic on Thursday evening. They asked that picnic attendees would “see the goodness of God” and that local government would revert from what they saw as a sign of the end of times.

“It’s a great demonstration of love,” Parker said. “Hate would not be doing or saying anything.”